by steve higgs
Dammit.
I bid him goodnight and went to my room, hurrying lest I lose my final drop of willpower and throw myself at him. I got undressed, hoping he might come and knock on my door, and fell asleep wondering if I should go and knock on his.
That was last night. I had woken alone with a dry mouth and a dull ache in my head from the overindulged champagne. I had showered and dressed and found Brett sitting at a desk in the main room inspecting a complicated spreadsheet of numbers. Steel futures he assured me. I did not know what that meant.
He ordered breakfast up to the room and took me on a boat down the Seine to a place that sold champagne by the case and then to a gallery and then to lunch. The day disappeared and before I knew it, we were back at the airport.
The flight back from Paris was seventy minutes; barely enough time to get comfortable in the enormous, luxury leather chair/beds in first class. The cabin crew offered me champagne again, which this time I declined. I did not have to drive when we landed as he had sent a car to collect me from my flat the previous day, but I had drunk enough last night and I felt that my evening might be best spent at the gym. Secretly I was worried/hopeful that I might be seen naked in the not too distant future and felt a need to get some squats and cardio in.
I had packed only a carry-on bag to avoid the baggage queue, but I now had a Louis Vuitton suitcase that he had supplied to make sure the Versace dress he bought me to wear to the Opera last night would get home safely. Somehow though the super-rich don't need to worry about carry-on limits, so I had not had to check my bag anyway.
I could get used to this.
He kissed me lightly goodbye outside the terminal where the same car and driver that had collected me was once again waiting to take me home.
Brett Barker. What a revelation. Gentleman, millionaire and… lover?
Maidstone Police Station. Monday, October 18th 0853hrs
The following morning, I awoke to an alarm which I had reluctantly set last night to go off at half past five and only hit the snooze button twice before I accepted the inevitable and forced myself out of bed. I had told myself that I needed to keep up my gym hours and I was actually feeling quite motivated as I swung my bag over my shoulder and left my flat.
At the gym in town though my motivation had abandoned me. The weights were mocking me from their stand. Why the hell are the small weights all pastel colours anyway? I don't need them to be pink for me to know that they are the ones I might be able to lift. I ignored their taunts and climbed onto an elliptical trainer where I spent twenty minutes sweating, grunting and groaning. Next to me had been an overweight man with a beard who had his machine on the minimum resistance setting and was barely even elevating his pulse. He had tried to talk to me – a regular gym hazard, so I had indicated my headphones and made out like I could not hear him. When I grew bored of the motion I switched to a treadmill. Pounding away, perspiration gathering in my bra, I daydreamed about Brett. His handsome face and light stubble grazing against the soft skin of my face, gently irritating the edge of my lips as we kissed. In my head, the kissing was getting more passionate, his hands were on my skin and digging into my hips. I could feel his… I let out a squeal as my right foot caught the stationary edge of the treadmill and I was flung off the machine to land painfully on the carpet tile.
Heads popped up around the gym. I was such a klutz. I had a friction burn to my left knee where it had hit the short carpet tile. Guys were rushing over to help me. I got up quickly, so I could wave them off. I was fine, just clumsy and distracted by thoughts of Brett getting naked for me.
By nine o’clock I was sitting at my desk with my bum cheeks already sore from the kettlebell squats I had forced myself to perform before I left the gym. My second cup of tea was cooling next to my mouse mat and I was idly working out how many hours I had left in the Police. I had quit my job a week ago, or slightly more than that now. I worked out that I had eleven shifts left. That was all. It would be ten by the time I finished today. I had been doing this job since I was twenty-one. What had I got out of it? I wanted to say not a lot, but I suppose the honest answer was that I had learned lots of life skills and I felt ready for my next job.
My next job, of course, was working with Tempest Michaels at the Blue Moon Investigation Agency. It had been my idea. I had approached him for the job rather than responding to a job advert as there was no advertised post. I couldn't work out what to make of Tempest, or how I felt about him. It was all fairly moot now as I was semi-officially dating Brett and quite happy about it, but I could not deny the fleeting interest. Tempest was good looking. Not as good looking at Brett but few were. He was polite, funny and engaging and I found that I liked spending time with him. I had thought he was single but then went to his house early one morning to find a woman there who had clearly spent the night. He was attracted to me, he had let that slip, but had failed to make any kind of move. Anyway, we were both seeing other people it seemed.
Working at an investigation agency probably sounds quite glamourous, evoking images of Sam Spade and black and white movies where the lady detective is resourceful and tough as nails while wearing silk stockings. Well, the reality is a little different and most especially at the Blue Moon Investigation Agency where what we investigate is paranormal crimes. That sounds stupid, doesn't it? Tempest came to it by accident. There was a mess up with his first business advert and suddenly he had clients calling with crazy cases where they believed they were being targeted by a witch or haunted by a ghost or whatever. He solved each case by finding the perfectly rational explanation for the situation they were experiencing and got to charge them for it. You may think it sounds like he is conning the people involved, but they are queuing up and begging him to take their cases.
‘Hey, girl. Where have you been all weekend? I sent you messages and snapchats and you didn't reply to any of them. And I know you read them because the iPhone told me,' the voice was coming from Patience Woods, a fellow police officer who was just arriving to sit at the desk next to mine. She was late. Again. We had been friends for about five years since she transferred to Maidstone from Chatham. She was currently stood with her arms crossed and was glaring down at me.
She had a good glare.
Patience is a plus size girl with boobs bigger than my head and a whole lot of junk in her trunk. Her default setting was loud, which right now meant that eighty percent of the office could hear her and were subsequently covering the mouthpiece of their headsets, so the person at the other end would not also hear her. She has more attitude than anyone I have ever met and did not care what anyone thought about her or it.
She dropped a three-pack of Krispy Kreme doughnuts on her desk and lowered herself into the chair. There was only one left in the pack, her lips were glistening with powdered sugar and as I watched, the last bite of dough-nut number two went into her mouth. She didn't break eye contact once. I felt a bead of sweat roll onto my collar.
‘Good morning, Patience. How are you?’
‘Don't you try that Disney Princess, white girl, butter wouldn't melt rubbish with me. Where the heck have you been?'
‘I was in Paris.’ There was no point in avoiding the conversation. She would get it out of me soon enough.
‘Paris? What’s in Paris?’ she asked.
‘Well, there is the Louvre, the Arc de Triumph, several…’
‘Nuh-uh. You know what I meant. I sat next to you all last week and you never once mentioned that you were going to Paris for the weekend. So, something changed.
‘I was on a date,’ I conceded.
‘A date?’
‘Yes.’
‘In Paris?’
‘Yes.’
‘With a man?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you better start spillin', girl. I need to hear all about your shag-fest weekend,' Patience instructed while taking a gulp of coffee and reaching for her final breakfast dough-nut.
I took a sip of my tea and from behind m
y mug quietly admitted that there had been no sex. Patience's eyes nearly popped out of her head with shock and I knew I was in for a grilling. Thankfully, at the same moment, Sergeant Butterworth looked up from his desk.
‘Do you mind, Patience?’ asked Sergeant Butterworth, ‘Some of us are trying to work. I believe that if you turn on your computer there will be work for you to do also.’
She fixed him with a look, her eyes bugging out at him like she could not believe that he had the audacity to interrupt her conversation, ‘Excuse me? Did you just interrupt me? Do you have no manners at all?’ Sergeant Butterworth was now out of his chair and coming across the office.
‘Patience, I need you to do some work,’ he said as he approached her work area, ‘I shouldn’t have to have a fight with you every day just to get you to do your job.’
Patience leaned forward a little in her chair and indicated with her head that he should come closer. He came forward another step and leaned down.
Patience hissed, ‘We are having a very private and personal conversation about Amanda’s vagina. Would you like to pull up your chair and join the conversation? Do you feel that you and your vagina can give us some insight as well?’
His face turned purple and he opened his mouth to respond but Patience wasn’t done yet.
‘It's hard for us girls here, surrounded by dicks all day. Sometimes we need lady chats and we shouldn't have to feel bad about that. I should be able to talk about my period and the awful cramps I'm getting any time I like without being made to feel bad about it. If you got a problem with that maybe I should talk to HR.'
As Sergeant Butterworth skulked angrily back to his desk Patience chuckled to herself, ‘See, girl? All you have to say is period or vagina and men run away terrified. Now, let’s get back to your broken vagina.’
‘Patience, my vagina isn’t broken,’ I replied, my voice distinctly more hushed than hers.
‘The hell it isn't. Why else would you spend a weekend in Paris, on a date and get no dick?'
‘I spent a pleasant weekend with a gentleman, Patience. Such men still exist.’
‘Oh. So, he’s gay then?’
‘No… At least I am pretty sure he is straight. There was plenty of passionate kissing and there was something very hard digging into my hip while we did it.’
‘Hold on. You spent a weekend in Paris in the same hotel room and you did not have sex. How do you manage that?’
‘We had separate bedrooms,’ I answered.
‘You had… hold on, what kind of hotel room has more than one bedroom?’ Patience was staring at me now, her mouth a quizzical hole in her face.
‘Um. The penthouse,’ I said quietly.
‘The penthouse!' she shrieked, ‘Oh, my God! Who were you with?' Everyone in the office turned to look at us. Sergeant Butterworth's head looked like it was about to explode
‘Do you remember I told you about Brett Barker?' She immediately turned to her computer screen, booted it into life and typed his name into a search engine. ‘Well, he asked me to go to Paris with him, so I went.' As I finished speaking his face appeared on her screen.
‘Babe. Your new dick is rich. And when I say rich, I mean Kanye West style rich.' The picture on her screen was a good one that showed just how handsome Brett really was. ‘Girl, that man in fine. How did you not get stuck in the dicksand this weekend?'
Just then, the Superintendent walked into the room and with a quick, ‘Oops.' Patience put on her headset and made it look like she was working.
Thankfully we were busy then and I could avoid further interrogation for the rest of the morning.
A Case for Me. Monday, October 18th 1230hrs
I heard a text ping through on my phone about half an hour before I was due to take my lunch. I ignored it until my break time came around but pulled my phone from my bag as I stood up to head to the canteen. Patience and I had different lunch break times most days, so I would be able to put off telling her about Brett for a bit longer yet. There wasn’t really anything to tell. Apart from that he is gorgeous, ridiculously rich, incredibly well-mannered… I could go on, but I was trying to ignore that he was literally perfect.
The text message was from Tempest to tell me that he had a case he didn’t have time for right now and to ask if I wanted to investigate it. He had forwarded me the email from the prospective client, so I switched to my emails to see what it was.
This would be my first case.
The client was the manager of the Pentagon Shopping Centre in Chatham. I knew it well. It was looking a little tired and worn but then Chatham was not really a place one went shopping unless you already lived there, and the indoor area, which was probably quite a draw forty years ago was now losing ground to bigger, brighter indoor shopping areas within an easy driving distance. He reported that he had a ghost living in his elevators. There was a poor-quality picture attached that showed two girls illuminated in the flash of the camera and man standing behind them. Each had a startled expression, but the focus of the photo was the blurry, indistinct shape next to the man. It looked like a ghost if one was willing to believe in such things, of course. I could see through it, so I had to admit that it had a certain ethereal aspect. The client's email went on to say that several shoppers had suffered frights as the elevator they were travelling in lost power. The lights would go out and, in most cases, the elevator stopped moving, but only for a second or so. Shoppers had reported that their possessions, mostly shopping bags full of new purchases had gone missing and several had reported that they had felt a draft or had felt something touch them or brush past them in the confines of the elevator. Then there was the picture captured by the two girls.
So, I had an unexplained mystery that the client was willing to pay us to solve. It was damaging his sales, he claimed, and the shareholders were squeezing his nuts to get the punters back in and the problem resolved before the Christmas rush started in a few short weeks.
I emailed back to Tempest, telling him that I would take the case and would go directly to the Pentagon when I finished my shift this evening. In the meantime, I would contact the client and arrange for him to meet me because it would be after shopping hours when I got there.
I ate the salad I had brought with me for my lunch and drank a glass of milk. My lunch break was nearly over so I used the facilities and went back to my desk just as Patience was getting up to take her break.
She made it clear that I still needed to spill the beans on my weekend but hustled off to get her lunch, leaving me to settle back behind my desk. Today the pair of us were dealing with converting calls into dispatching uniforms in response. It was often tedious, and it was not what I was usually assigned to do, but in the dying days of my career with the Police, it was what they had given me. I slipped my headset on again and the afternoon drifted away, absorbed by myriad minor incidents.
It got quiet around three o’clock, so I pushed my chair back a bit and stretched without getting up.
Patience swivelled in her chair to face me, ‘So?' she asked.
‘There really isn’t much to tell,’ I started.
‘Don’t give me that. You spent the weekend in Paris with a multi-millionaire Adonis. There has to be something to tell and if there isn’t something to tell then you need to tell me what the heck is wrong with you,’ Patience had fixed me with a look that made it clear I wasn’t going to get away without telling her all about it. I opened my mouth to speak but she was already talking again, ‘That man is fine with capital letters. F – I – N – E. If he had taken me to Paris for the weekend, I would have ridden him like a pony on a carousel. That boy would be ruined for all other women for eternity. That’s how good sex with me is, girl.’
I stared at her, slightly scared and very much in awe of her self-confidence. Maybe she was right. Was I stupid to have resisted sleeping with him? Had he expected me to and through not fulfilling my end of the bargain had I now ruined any chance of a second date? My mind slowly started to drift, fil
led with thoughts of Brett naked. I was willing to bet that sex with Brett would be good. Maybe good. I was ready to bet that he knew what to do with a woman.
Suddenly Patience’s voice cut through my fantasy, ‘Girl, are you even listening to me? I know that look. You’re thinking about sex with him right now, aren’t you? You have that look in your eye and a stupid grin on your face.’ I shook my head and cursed myself silently.
Patience had crossed her arms and was glaring at me, ‘If there was no sex then tell me about the romance. I am single and need to hear that romance still exists for someone.’
I conceded and spent the next twenty minutes describing the hotel, the opera, the first-class seats on the plane, the first-class treatment everywhere we went and how he had been such an absolute gentleman all weekend. She was amazed that he went to the trouble of opening doors for me, shocked and envious that he had bought me a dress that was so expensive it didn’t even have a price tag and had then bought Louis Vuitton luggage, so I could get it home, and she was utterly confused with how I hadn’t thrown myself at him when we had kissed passionately in the elevator. I had shrugged and said that it was too soon to be falling into bed.
Then she asked when I was seeing him again and I didn’t have an answer. Should I text him? Thus far all the pursuing had been done by him. Was that fair? Would he welcome an invitation from me? Did I then invite him to my flat and make him dinner? I certainly couldn’t stretch to a night at the opera with champagne. What if he turned up in a Bentley or a Lamborghini? It would get stolen in seconds outside my place in Maidstone.
‘Patience?’
‘Yes, Honey?’
‘How long do I wait before I text him?’
‘Girl you don’t need to text him. Wait for him to text you.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Why? Girl, how is it that a woman with an ass like yours is so dumb about men still? He spent all that money, he wined and dined you and treated you like a queen because he wants to get at that ass. Until you give it up you don’t have to do anything. After that, then maybe you got to call him or do things for him occasionally. Right now, though, that boy is yours. Make him work for it.’